“I would prefer not to”, 2020

The plexiglas case encloses an image of a face with a hand shading its eyes taken from a youthful self-portrait by Joshua Reynolds, while arranged on the reading stand set up in front of the wall are reproductions of autograph writings. On the ground a blank sheet of paper held down by a plexiglas sheet features in the artist's own handwriting the words “I would prefer not to”, taken from the short story Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street (1853) by Herman Melville.
By way of the gaze looking out into the distance, beyond the contingency of the here-and-now, the author listens as he awaits a revealing signal or an apparition on the horizon. This attitude is heightened by the above-cited quotation from Melville, often used by Paolini in his writings, which marks a position of withdrawal and absence, a voluntary exile with respect to the everyday context that is nurtured by the need for productivity, activism, busyness, and communication (in Melville's short story the main character is hired as a scrivener – which explains the presence of the writings on the music stand – who gradually ceases to perform his duties to withdraw into silence, until he eventually reaches the negation of everything, even of himself).